Radix, page 20
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
But life in the swamp was difficult. He had to content himself eating roots, insects, and the small prey he could catch. Each day enjambed the next like the structure of a dream, and slowly the selfscan that Mauschel had been so fervent about began to make sense. It consisted of watching, simply watching without thinking. The difficulty lay in learning to live with himself.
He remembered Gage and Ignatz with dark and rueful feelings. Becoming a ranger had turned out to be viciously harder than they had ever intimated. In the first months of his swamp life, he had been ambushed several times by other recruits. And this blundering carried a high price. An ambushed recruit lost everything he had to those who found him: foraged food, knives, even clothes. Twice, Sumner had almost starved. Then he learned to stop wondering and simply watch—watch everything, his whole body a lens open to time, perceiving every sexual moment of the day, every turn of the wind.
One day, watching light rising up the trees in a slow silence as night came on, Sumner sensed someone closing in. He slunk noiselessly through the underbrush and squeezed himself into the embrace of a thick-bodied willow. Bird chirpings circled his hearing, and wind breathed algal scents through tufted grass. As his thoughts thinned and selfscan deepened, he centered on the approach of the other.
From beneath huge elm roots, along the mud rim of a black pool, a shadowfigure appeared and moved swiftly in Sumner’s direction. The figure stayed close to the ground, obscured by ferns, but Sumner could hear fatigue in the heavy gait. He fixed his attention on the palmetto leaves flexing in the wind until the intruder strode hard past him—a hooded man in gray jerkin and leggings.
Sumner waited a pace and then swung out with his left arm, fast and low, and caught a skinny, fawn-boned ankle. With a twist, he toppled the lanky body and jumped astride, forcing his knee into the back of the narrow jerkin. He seized the hood in one hand and jerked it back.
A scream widened in his eyes. He stared at a distort: a bald creature with moon-marbled skin and red eyes.
The distort thrashed, and Sumner pulled back stiffly on the hood and reached for his knife. Mauschel had ordered him at several of their regular sessions to kill any distorts he encountered. Looking down at the oyster-gray face, he felt his knife strong and right in his hand. But he did not strike.
Foc orders! He let the hood go and stepped back, sheathing his knife. The distort rolled over and sat staring at him with raw eyes, face childlike and tilted slightly as if listening to some feeling-pitched song just within hearing.
“Get out of here before a real ranger shows up,” Sumner gruffed.
The distort shakily stood and bowed. With malformed hands open in gratitude, it stepped closer. Sumner turned, but before he could move away, the creature touched him. His vision smudged, and a strand of ice-wind finer than a thread of starlight curled over his skin. Is it wrong to love everyone? a gentle voice asked at the back of his head. His whole body shuddered, and an overwhelming euphoria rushed up through the hollows of his lungs and throat. When he blinked sight into his eyes, the distort had gone.
But the telepathic bond between them remained. Sumner felt the other being long into the night. Sprawled out in his mangaba tree, wrung by the distort’s exhaustion, he felt its swamp-dread as it crossed a fen of mosstrees and quicksand. Deeper, he knew the being’s fear of what it was fleeing: Distort-hunters had found its tribe three nights ago, and the whole forest the tribe lived in had been set ablaze. The companion that had crossed the hills and entered the swamp with it had been spotted yesterday and shot in the back, just below the shoulder, blowing its heart into its hands.
Sumner turned restlessly in his lair, and at the far end of the swamp the distort felt his unease and stopped running. The earth it squatted against was cold wet darkness, but the sky swirled with auroras, a drunkenness of light. Sumner experienced the distort’s awe and relaxed. As he circled toward sleep, the telepathy opened into sound, and he heard the distort’s quiet voice a last time: I think it is good to live.
***
Under the tutelage of a blind man with a back as broad as a bison’s and all five senses in his hands, Sumner rigorously worked to toughen the vulnerable parts of his body. He pounded sand and deadwood with his hands, feet, elbows, and knees, armoring them with bone-callus. Punches and massage hardened his sternum and abdomen until a tree limb could be broken across his stomach. And he learned to instantly flex and relax his neck so that he could absorb blows to his face with his eyes open. Only then did Mauschel reveal how properly to compress breath into the needletip of the body’s center and to twist each blow at the precise moment of impact. When Sumner could knock the bark off a tree with his bare hands and feet, the blind master was through with him. The recruit had learned to use his whole body at once.
From a wiry old woman with mud-brown skin, Kagan mastered the botanical secrets of the land, learning to make curare with strychnos vines, malarial prophylaxes from cinchona bark, barbasco insect repellent, and a potent painkiller out of waxy red genipa berries.
Lounging in the blanched grass on a knoll of cedar during a pause in his training, watching deer feed, Sumner felt like singing. But music was a ghost in his mouth, because he felt uneasy with his voice. And so he lay in the tree-chopped sunlight with other recruits, content to listen to the birds’ green songs.
These men might starve him in the swamp if he weren’t alert, but during the training sessions that they shared they were brothers. Strong and poised as any of them, he rested between wrestling sessions, humming with the just-seen knowledge of bodytwists, kneelocks, and slinky evasions. He looked down with pride at the rays of muscle in his legs. And for that seldom moment, hair starred with sweat, chest and torso muscledrawn and gleaming, his life was divined.
***
At the far end of the office in a darkly shaded back room with the door ajar, a deep waited. She had been sent by Ranger Command to assess telepathically the recruits at Dhalpur and cull any latent deeps. Every year at this time, for the last thirty-two years, she had come to this swamphole, to this very tarpaper shack, and opened herself to the minds of killers. She had become increasingly sensitive—and bored.
Deeps—telepathically endowed humans—survived as the only distorts tolerated by the Massebôth, though secretly. Fetal-induced kiutl, under proper conditions, produced deeps. But they lived stringently proscripted lives. Neither the Black nor the White Pillar trusted them wholly, and the Pillars kept them under perpetual observation.
Even so, this old deep had grown satisfied with her life, if not her work, and her self-content showed in her wide-spaced eyes—gray, acutely alert eyes. Silver hair, short and stylishly feathered, framed a patrician, noble-browed face. She glanced over Sumner Kagan’s dossier, pausing briefly at Broux’s murder. The deeps who had investigated Broux’s death had immediately discerned Sumner’s culpability, and they had marked him then as a possible ranger. The trick with assessing killers, she had learned, lay in eliminating the ones who stopped short.
She thumbed a kiutl-tab into her mouth and looked up to see a tall, long-shouldered man with red hair walking tentatively through the outer office. Wisdom brightened in her eyes, and mindmusic brimmed into her ears: She observed the golden bodylight around the giant, and the sight of this genetically integral human, this whole man, tuned happily inside her.
She looked again at the dossier to identify this ranger’s docent. Mauschel—the distort, she noted with a flicker of disappointment. That strict man worked the recruits too hard—wanting his warriors to accomplish his unfinished life. He too frequently ruined men. As if his pain were the world’s. She put the paperboard aside and covered it with a fold of her white robe.
Sumner filled the doorway, the broad set of his eyes taking in her and all of the room at once. She signed him to close the door and sit in a cane chair opposite her. As he gracefully lowered himself into her presence, continually studying her with those bunsen-blue eyes, she spotted the purple scald marks at the sides of his neck. “How did that happen, soldier?” she asked, touching her throat.
“Voors,” Sumner replied, and at the sound of his voice she peered into him and entered the shadow of a dead world: a crater pool surrounded by dying tamarinds, nodules of fungus blistering the grass where acrid vapors smoked out of the earth—a blunderland of mad flies and trees with the shapes of pain. And there, rising out of the green water of the pool, a child white as nothingness with eyes like ice.
She blinked, startled by the clarity of her in-seeing. Then, with disciplines drilled into her since infancy, she brought her mind back into the present. She didn’t want to know about voors or anything else in this man’s past. She had been sent to do one thing: find other deeps. The less she took away with her, the better she would sleep that night.
“Just that name—voors—scares me,” she lied convincingly, opening a notebook in her lap. “I’m from Prophecy, and I only leave the city once a year to do this survey for Ranger Command. I’m here to see that the recruits are well-treated. One of my tactics is to speak with as many of you as I can. I hope you’ll be frank with me. Nothing you say here will be associated with you again, unless you wish it so.” She smiled, and Sumner nodded, only the microshifts in the muscle-armoring around his eyes revealing his suspicion. “Are you happy here?” she asked ingenuously.
Sumner sat tall yet relaxed, modulating his breathing the way Mauschel had taught him to do when being interrogated. “Yes.”
In that one sound, the deep penetrated the grimness in this man’s life: the arduous fighting drills, the anxiety of ambush in the swamp’s dark spaces, the loneliness—But she searched past this emotional fog looking for a special kind of silence—the depth of the telepath.
“Tell me about yourself,” she said. “Anything at all. Just talk.” The deep lowered her eyes, pretending to write in her notebook, her gaze loosely following her scrawl as she centered into trance.
Sumner shifted in his seat and glanced around at the threadbare carpet, the bamboo-slatted windows....
“Talk—please.”
“I was ambushed again, a few days ago,” he admitted, words spiraling into his mind. “I hate getting caught, because then I have to feel what I did wrong until my guts ache. That’s the only way I can forget. I hurt myself for a while.”
She urged him on with a roll of her free hand.
“Sometimes I feel like water locked inside a tree,” he continued, burst-skull feelings jumping into words. “I’m tired of sword classes and gun classes and hiding in the swamp and taking orders. But then I think, all of life is shit. We live until we die and then nothing. Does anybody have the right to want anything?”
He paused. The woman had stopped writing and sat there with her eyes closed. “Dhalpur has been the strongest life I’ve had so far,” he added softly.
The old woman hadn’t heard a word of what he had said. She stared long into his mindark, casting about among the daze of memories and thought-loops for the silence. But this man was all dreaming. His bodylight shone with wondrous force, but his mindark appeared muddled. She closed the notebook and placed her palms over her eyes. “Thank you, soldier. You may go now.”
“That’s all?” Sumner asked, the hurt he had brought forward burning behind his eyes.
“Yes, that’s all. Please go now.”
Sumner stood and went to the door slowly. Outside, heat rippled in the air over the metal roofs of the swamp village where the officers lived, and he loitered, watching that for a while, feeling that he had left something behind.
***
At the end of his third year in the wilderness, Sumner went mad. The rigorous demands of his training and the vast solitude of his life in selfscan crushed him. It happened while he watched the rain moving in vague pillars over the savanna, as he completed a complex routine Mauschel had taught him. The toes of both of his feet tied and untied tedious strings of knots, one hand repeated wrist and finger maneuvers with a butterfly-blade, the other packed and fitted cartridges while, deeper, he fluttered his diaphragm, signaling his heart to slow down.
Each day for months, he had been doing this and more intricate routines, and he had become expert at settling deep into himself and watching his body function on its own. But today, with rain smoking just outside his burrow and wind whispering over the grasslands with a sound almost human, he found that he couldn’t stop. Lunatic precision guided his toes knotting and unknotting twine, his left hand flashing sharp metal around his fingers, his right hand capping bullets, and his heart consciously slowing and slowing, gliding beyond his control.
Sitting in a broth of umber light, his limbs moving mechanically, his will paralyzed, Sumner felt his heart stop. His toes and hands went on even as the whine of blood, tuning its high note in his ears, thinned out of hearing. Vision narrowed and misty oblivion circled in, muffling his panic—
Pain abrupt as a scream wrenched him out of his trance. The butterfly-blade had nicked his thumb. He stared with sudden lucidity at the pale slice in his flesh and saw how the blood held back. Then the red flow began, and his heart quopped loudly in his ears.
Unthinking, he dropped everything and ran barefoot into the rain. The wind slashed at him, and he wondered what he was doing. Unwilled selfscan took over, blocking out thoughts and feelings, and propelling him into the storm.
He ran with the storm, following the wizenings of the wind, heedless of siltholes and mudpools. The rain wandered on ahead, leading him staggering into the gloom of a misty forest. A dense effluvium of rotting bark and wet earth engulfed him, and he stopped with his arms widespread. The vaporous fatigue of his long run rose out of his legs and chest and fogged over his mind. He dropped to the fleshy earth and slept deep.
The storm passed, and he listened to rain-leavings: the hum of water puddling, the sigh of puddles wrinkling to mist. The snap of a drop against a naked root alerted him to himself. He lay soaked, cold, and sunken in the black humus, breathing through his mouth. But he didn’t move. Something awesome had happened to him during his forest sleep. He couldn’t say what it was—but he knew.
Hearing the varied patterns of leaf drops, the sparge of ferns, the irregular rhythm of vine-sprinklings, he experienced power. Not stamina or energy but quiescence. As he rose out of the exhaustion of his hysterical run, he felt clean as the white woodmeat he saw beside him in storm-broken branches. The power he experienced guided him effortlessly over the uncertain forest floor, and with it came impeccable clarity. The world had become transparent: He noted where the wind, swollen with rain, had tided, forcing out life or killing what remained; and he beheld through the slides of mud and branches where small animals hid, drugged with cold. In exposed rock, one glance at the lithified sediments revealed the whole history of the forest—a buried river bottom, a vanished desert. Control wider than intent had shaped everything, as it had shaped him. But, as chaotic as it seemed, there was control: reeds designed to sway with wind; leaves wax-coated and shaped to shed rain; each predator a prey, untangling its own small knot of time.
Sumner turned his clarity on himself. Strolling casually along the forest’s edge, all senses poised, he realized that the total control the Rangers pushed him to develop had always been his—it was just a matter of ease and recognition. His body, like the forest, carried a precise ecology. The bacterial tides in his blood influenced the strength or lethargy in his muscles, and they could be modified with herbs, breathing, food intake. His irises worked autonomically, but he had learned to tense and relax those subtle muscles by first recognizing and then imagining the feel of light and darkness. In a similar way, he had learned to lure blood away from a wound, and to regulate the temperature of different limbs, and to hear with his fingertips. The secret, he understood now, dwelt not in diligent control but in recognition and compliance. It was so easy.
Images of his past materialized in the pauses between breaths. Instantly, he fixed his mind on the tocking of tree toads, thunder rumbling over the forest’s eaves, an orange uteral blossom unmolested by the storm, before he caught himself trying to catch himself.
Relax—
He let his memories unwind, and as each one passed through him, he looked at it the way he would a jungle covert for the things it hid. And he appreciated that all his life he had desperately been trying to control everything around him.
A deep memory from the only winter he had ever experienced filled him, and again he saw the shape of his breath, ice-enameled steps, fangs of ice in the trees, snow-dervishes spinning down the streets, and a red-eared horse with a white diamond on its nose. Clearly, he recalled the urge to hurt that horse, to assert his mastery. And he remembered riding it out onto the pond—That was the day that he had first equated violence with control.
The memories continued, and with his remorseless clarity he watched himself rage at his father’s death and continue to rage as the Sugarat, driven by the constant dread that his father’s control would never be his.
Sumner wandered the narrows of the forest, retracing the course of his life. He cut through the shame and guilt of the many years he had spent deceiving his mother, and he fully experienced and then abandoned the tenacious nostalgia he felt for his car, his room, his scansule, and, at last, he perceived how his need for command had made him a dupe for voors. All the memories of Corby and Jeanlu that he had so fanatically evaded over the years returned undiminished. Sensations ghosted through him: the bloodchill that sparked around Corby’s body; the deathchant that Jeanlu’s corpse had chattered in his face while hanging from his neck; and the deva—the ruby light, the cold saffron sun, and the maddening, impossible flight over Rigalu Flats. At this point, he came to the edge of the forest, where sunset-lengthened shadows stretched black to infinity.
He moved out across the grasslands at an easy gait, reviewing his past in the scarlet light. He walked all night, traveling where starlight blew off the water, moving without anxiety through panther glades and over buffalo hills where hind rats stalked. Moonhandled, alert, he proceeded invisibly, prey to nothing, intent on deciphering all the parables of his life. The change that had come over him was permanent. He would never again be confused.
